Tackling Georgia Election Results in Atlanta

February 18, 2015

For OpenElections volunteers coming to NICAR in Atlanta next month, we’ve got a challenge for you: help us tackle Georgia election results.

As we did last year in Baltimore, OpenElections will hold an event on Sunday, March 8, with the goal of writing scrapers and parsers to load 2000-2014 election results from the Peach State, and we’re looking for some help. It’s a great way to get familiar with the project and see what our processes are.

Georgia offers some different tasks, from scraping HTML results to using our Clarify library to parse XML from more recent elections. So we’re looking for people who have some familiarity with Python and election results, but we’re happy to help guide those new to the process, too. Thanks to our volunteers, we’ve already got a good record of where election result data is stored by the state.

Here’s how the process will work: we’ll start by reviewing the state of the data – what’s available for which elections – and then start working on a datasource file that connects that data to our system. After that, we’ll begin writing code to load results data, using other states as our models. As part of that process, we’ll pre-process HTML results into CSVs that we store on Github.

If you’re interested in helping out, there are two things to do: first, let us know by emailing openelections@gmail.com or on Twitter at @openelex. Second, take the time to setup the development environment on your laptop following the instructions here. We’re looking forward to seeing you in Atlanta!